Firefox 13 Released, Debuts Brand New Tab Page and Homepage

MrSeb writes "Mozilla has officially released Firefox 13. Unlike Firefox 12 (or 11, or 10, or indeed many of the recent Firefox versions), Firefox 13 is an important release with a handful of much-needed features that are long overdue. There's a new New Tab Page launcher, with your favorite and most-used websites, and a new default home page with one-click access to Bookmarks, Settings, Add-ons, etc. SPDY is on by default, too, which should help ameliorate the perceived speed difference between Chrome and Firefox. Finally, the developer tools (Page Inspector, Style Inspector, etc.) have been tweaked and updated!"

Comments

The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention

[hobarrera]

I've seen this news all over the web since yesterday, however, the "new tab" page as it is, isn't a Chrome feature, it actually comes from Opera, which had it way before Chrome existed.

Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera doesn't count, the only reason anybody used Opera was to say the used Opera, then turn their nose up and storm off in a huff. Everybody who knew better used a real browser like Netscape Communicator.

Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention

[Baloroth]

Why do Opera fanboys feel the need to convince everyone that Opera invented the web?

Because they did, more or less. Tabs, mobile browsing, CSS support, built-in adblocking (which no other major browser even has, as far as I know), speed... yeah, Opera pretty much pioneered everything important about modern web browsers, and they deserve a lot of credit for that.

Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention

[Cl1mh4224rd]

Seriously. Who pays for a web browser?

A couple things have changed while you were in your apparent coma: nearly 3,000 people were killed and World Trade Centers 1, 2, 3 and 7 were destroyed in a terrorist attack on the United States 10.5 years ago and desktop Opera has been free for roughly 12 years now.

Welcome back.

Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention

[Tyler Eaves]

It wasn't during the time period that they were actually innovating.

Friday, December 24, 2004

Tyler Eaves
--edited address out--

Order receipt from BMT Micro, Inc.
Order ID: 2275341
Order Number: 2004-1224-1543-51-678

Qty Product Description Price Shipping Subtotal
  1 3100023 Opera 7 for Desktop 39.00 0.00 41.73

Sales tax: USD 2.73
Total bill: USD 41.73

Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention

[fafaforza]

No, it isn't a bookmark grid. It is a list of sites you most frequently visit, albeit set manually.

I don't think I would want one that changes dynamically based on the past 3 days of my surfing. When I open Opera, I hit Ctrl+3, Ctrl+5, Ctrl+6, Crtl+2 and have the pages I want to see at the outset. I remember what spot each page is and can open it in a new tab blindfolded.

As is, Firefox's version is a bit gimmicky, trying to one-up Speed Dial in order not to make it seem like a feature copy.

Re:The new-tab page isn't a chrome invention

[similar_name]

According to Wikipedia a browser called InternetWorks had tabs in 1994.

NOOOO

[ColdWetDog]

Now it looks like Safari.

Last week it looked like Chrome.

I'm going back to Internet Explorer. Or maybe Mosaic.

Either that or I'm going to wait another week for Firefox 16 which will likely imitate Facebook.

Re:NOOOO

[Samantha Wright]

If it helps, I use Firefox 15 (Nightly), and its UI hasn't changed much since FF13, except for the inclusion of a new pop-up list download manager. I don't know of anything else that this resembles, but I find it really efficient; much better than trying to make do with clumsy "clear and close" extensions for the classic FF download manager, which itself hadn't changed since the dawn of the Firefox project.

Re:NOOOO

[al.caughey]

I use Firefox mainly during the day

Yes, but...

[Daetrin]

"There's a new New Tab Page launcher, with your favorite and most-used websites, and a new default home page with one-click access to Bookmarks, Settings, Add-ons, etc."

Okay, that's great, but what are the much-needed features that they added?

Re:Yes, but...

[Daetrin]

Okay, now that i've actually tried it.... dear gods what is that thing? In Chrome the new tab page has smallish pictures of your most recently/commonly visited sites, with borders between them and titles underneath each one. I just opened up a new tab in FF and practically burned my eyes out.

There are no borders between the pictures, it's just a three by three grid of screenshots mashed together. Two of the images are of www.google.com (why two? I dunno) but it only shows the top left corner of the page. For all the other sites it shows the whole page, and then repeats the first third of the page along the right side. And then on top of the messed up images, in very small letters that still somehow manage to clash, is the name of the page/site. When you mouse over one of the images two small grey boxes appear at the upper left and upper right corners. The boxes are blank, but if you mouse over them you see that one is to "pin" the site, and the other is to remove it.

Maybe one of my plug-ins is breaking stuff (even though i told NoScript to allow "about:newtab") but there's just something messed up if what is supposedly a fundamental part of the browser itself is broken that easily. And if that's actually how it's supposed to look... they really need to fire whoever they have in charge of UI over there.

In short, i don't think the page launcher in Chrome is necessary (i'll use it sometimes just because it's there, especially since there are only a couple sites i visit with Chrome anyways, but i never felt the lack in FireFox) however at least that one doesn't hurt to look at.

Laugh

[koan]

I'll wait until tomorrow and get FF14

Re:Laugh

[Yvan256]

It's already available.

Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat

[zill]

That would break every website that uses CDN or have multiple domains. That's probably half of the web right there. Not even wikipedia will load under those draconian rules.

Tab launcher garbage was first thing I turned off

[dstyle5]

after I updated to 13. Sorry, I'm not using a tablet or smartphone Firefox guys. Please design it for the platform I'm using.

Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat

[kesuki]

"So, if I go to slashdot.org, I want my browser to only fetch things from slashdot.org. Not scorecardresearch, not doubleclick, not gstatic, not google, not facebook, etc"

you want noscript then.

Smooth Scrolling

[Luthair]

is terrible and they turned it on by default? I immediately noticed that scrolling was sluggish and at first I mistook that for a performance problem...

Re:Smooth Scrolling

[hobarrera]

Smooth scrolling makes it extremely hard (impossible actually) to read as you scroll. It's the sort of eye-candy which REDUCES functionality, I don't really understand why anyone would want it (honestly: how often do you scroll and don't want to read as you scroll down. AT ALL.

Re:Just leave me out of it

[Thavilden]

The OS already has a perfectly fine task-switching mechanism.

Let me guess, a GIMP developer?

Can't please everyone

[ubergeek65536]

Speed dial is one of the first things I disabled when I tried Opera. Now I need to get rid of it in Firefox too.

Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat

[cerberusss]

Or Ghostery

Re:Okay...

[nmb3000]

They were fixed in Firefox 7: http://www.gadgetvenue.com/firefox-7-to-use-up-to-50-percent-less-memory-08114900/

If by fixed you mean browser usability was sacrificed in order to make the apparent memory usage drop, then yes. My biggest complaint with these memory "improvements" is in regard to image handling:

- Images are now decode-on-draw meaning they display slower and background tab images are not decoded. Browsing an image gallery or some other image-heavy site is now obscenely painful in Firefox.

- Decoded images on background tabs only live for 10-20 seconds and then are discarded at which point they must be re-decoded when the tab is activated. Long-lived tabs like Gmail now flicker every time you switch back to them as images are re-decoded.

These are just the two that come to mind right away. Luckily they can be fixed by tweaking some about:config settings (image.mem.decodeondraw and image.mem.min_discard_timeout_ms). Unfortunately many cannot be fixed so easily.

I'm really tired of the Firefox devs choosing (usually wrong) user complaints over good design and usability practices.

Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat

[magic maverick]

That'd be RequestPolicy actually. NoScript doesn't stop images from external domains being loaded (the 'traditional' way of tracking across the web).

Re:Tab launcher garbage was first thing I turned o

[d3ac0n]

Aaaand i just figured out how to disable that.

In about:config, just type in "newtab" and search

You will get 3 choices.
First one is the URL for new tabs. Set it to what you want (I use about:blank)

Set the other two settings to false and the fancy schmancy crappy new tab is gone.

How to disable the newtab page

[Golden_Rider]

First thing I did was to look for an option to disable the "Newtab page" (the feature that Firefox shows you your most used websites including little pictures of them whenever you open a new tab). Seems the Firefox devs decided that this is such an important function that there is no option to disable it in the settings dialogue, or at least I could not find one. But you can disable it via about:config and then setting "browser.newtabpage.enabled" to "false". Guess that is handy if you do NOT want your boss/colleagues to find out about your "hotponysex" fetish whenever you want to open a harmless Intranet page while somebody standing next to you.

Re:How to disable the newtab page

[ftobin]

There's a button you can hit on the top-right of new tab pages that toggles the setting you found.

Conentrate on the browser part

[gorgano]

I love Firefox and use it every day, but I'm getting a little tired and confused with some of the features they keep putting into the core. I've always thought one of the great things about Firefox is the extensions; and while other browsers offer similar 'add-on' concepts, Firefox just seems to do it better. Why aren't they concentrating on just making a seriously good browser engine and then leaving the extra stuff to the extension developers. Or, if it's something important, get with the extension developers and help them out, offer a 'Firefox suggested extension package' that downloads and enables extensions by default. That way, all the 'normal' users get the cool goodies, and the rest of us can turn them off or uninstall them all together if it's not something we need.

For instance, the new development centric stuff they have in FF13 is nice. But it doesn't hold a candle to the development tools that have been in IE9 and Chrome for some time. I use Firebug for all my web debugging needs in FF and it works wonderfully. Get with those guys and improve their already awesome extension. Don't try to re-invent every cool extension and add it to the core. Not everyone needs it, not everyone wants it. Just build the fastest, most standards compliant browser out there that offers an amazing extension engine and you'll have a winning browser.

Re:Conentrate on the browser part

[jlebar]

Why aren't they concentrating on just making a seriously good browser engine and then leaving the extra stuff to the extension developers

Believe it or not, 90% or more of our engineering effort goes into "the browser part" (that is, Gecko, our rendering engine, and SpiderMonkey, our JS engine). Have a look through the list of bugs fixed in FF13 to see what I mean.

It's just that these back-end improvements are not things most people can understand -- I work on Gecko and I don't understand most of the changes that go into it -- so PR and the press instead focus on highly visible UI stuff.

Re:Go Firefox!

[I(rispee_I(reme]

I tried Chromium. There is a problem: I've become addicted to tree-style tabs, courtesy of the Firefox extension.

Chromium/Chrome had this feature natively for a long time, until the developers disabled it in a sneaky-Pete maneuver that pissed off a bunch of people.

The obvious response, to write a Chromium extension for Tree-Style Tabs, is not an option. The Chromium plugin API does not expose the functionality necessary to do so.

Webkit (Chromium/Chrome's layout engine) seems to be a little faster than Gecko (Firefox's equivalent), but I would prefer to use a browser that gives the user (ME!) control over it, even at the cost of some rendering speed.

The time I would gain in rendering efficiency would probably be lost trying to scan this, as opposed to this.

Re:One Man's Feature is Another Man's Bloat

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

The only feature that I want that is long overdue is a setting wherein the browser will make HTTP GETs only to the original domain. So, if I go to slashdot.org, I want my browser to only fetch things from slashdot.org. Not scorecardresearch, not doubleclick, not gstatic, not google, not facebook, etc etc etc.

You want RequestPolicy - it does exactly what you want and lets you whitelist on a per-site basis. So, for example, you could let google pages also pull in stuff from gstatic.com but no other websites could pull in stuff from gstatic.com.

RequestPolicy is more powerful than adblock/noscript/ghostery because of the per-site control - all of those others don't care about what site the request is coming from, only the one it is going to. At best they let you whitelist the requests from an entire site, RequestPolicy is much more fine-grained. Those other add-ons are important too, they just have different strengths.

Re:And Not One Fuck Was Given....

[Tarlus]

I just fear FF 3.6 becoming the new IE 6...